Practice Contestation in and between Communities of Practice: From Top-Down to Inclusive Policymaking at the World Bank
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract By focusing on like-mindedness, community of practice (CoP) scholars are often accused of downgrading issues of power and contestation. This article theorizes practice contestation as an integral part of participation in a community. Building on a relational ontology and the concept of epistemic power, I define practice contestation as tacit (practical) or discursive interventions challenging the shared background knowledge of a CoP. This process is bidirectional (pushing for and against change) and happens at two levels (within a CoP and at the boundaries with other CoPs). This framework leads to four types of practice contestation: internal disruption, internal resistance, external pressure, and external resistance. These concomitant types of contestation participate in the constant fluctuations of international practices and social orders. Methodologically, this article looks at the CoP of World Bank’s senior managers and their boundaries with other communities, and it builds on interview material and archival documents collected between 2017 and 2020.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.030 | 0.051 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.052 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.023 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.024 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".